the universe is such a strange place that new discoveries often confuse and baffle astronomers
as they attempt to explain their findings but sometimes these discoveries can avoid
understanding for a long time what weird things have scientists found while searching the cosmos
you're watching matter and today we're diving into 10 space discoveries
that left astronomers confused number 10 brown dwarfs the stars that aren't quite stars there are
many types of stars that live throughout our universe with many different sizes
and features astronomers have begun to find more and more of one particular type of star
that doesn't quite fit the definition of a star but also doesn't fit the definition of a planet
either these objects are called brown dwarfs or failed stars and a newly completed study
is suggesting that there may be more lurking in the cosmos they found that these brown dwarfs
form in the same way that stars do but they lack the necessary mass to start the process of nuclear
fusion the amount of mass that brown dwarfs can contain range from the mass of 13 jupiters
to the mass of 80 jupiters how many of these strange objects could be floating through space
number nine estar was able to survive its own supernova astronomers discovered a star
a white dwarf whizzing through the cosmos at breakneck speeds reaching 900
000 kilometers an hour the star also came with an extremely odd composition of carbon
sodium and aluminum instead of the expected hydrogen and helium it was also quite small
only about 40 percent as massive as the sun after careful study the team of scientists
could only come up with one theory that would explain the star's composition mass
missing elements and speed the star must have gone through a partial supernova and survived
this explosion would have ejected much of the stellar mass along with missing elements while
blasting the remaining star out into space at an incredibly high speed number eight a black
hole is slowly turning a star into a planet in a galaxy roughly 250 million light years away
astronomers have found a star caught in a unique orbit that led to some unexpected consequences
first found when they detected bright x-ray bursts coming periodically from this galaxy the star in
question is flying in an odd spirographic orbit around a black hole at extreme speeds
it is moving so fast that one complete orbit takes just nine hours while orbiting the black hole this
star is slowly being feasted upon and is losing its matter to the black hole's gravitational pull
it has already shrunk from a red giant to a white dwarf since it got stuck in this orbit millions
of years ago and scientists theorize that the star will continue to leach matter to the black
hole in about a trillion years time the star will have lost enough mass that it will become a planet
with a mass roughly similar to jupiter's the only question left for it is will our universe exist
long enough for this process to unfold number seven a planet survived the death of its star
in a glimpse into the process that will likely happen to our solar system as the sun reaches the
end of its life astronomers were able to discover a jupiter-sized planet orbiting a white dwarf star
roughly 6 500 light years away stars classified as a white dwarf star are the relatively
dim remains of a star similar to the sun this planet is not only similar in size to jupiter
it also orbits at roughly the same distance from its star in the future of our solar system
the sun will begin to expand to an incredible size and will likely engulf the inner planets possibly
including earth while the outer planets have a much better chance of surviving this expansion
afterwards when the sun is out of fuel it will stop expanding and the inner regions will condense
into a white dwarf with a radius and luminosity just a fraction of what it is today
at that point even if the earth wasn't destroyed during the expansion the sun will no longer
produce enough thermal energy to warm our planet and it would likely become an icy world number six
a massive cloud of vapor was found floating in space life as we know it requires water
as one of its main components which has led astronomers to search for it throughout the cosmos
for a long time it was unknown how much water might be out there and if it was as rare as it was
once believed to be but slowly astronomers began to discover asteroids made of ice planets with
liquid water and many other instances of water in the universe while studying a galaxy roughly 10
billion light years from earth scientists found the largest stash of water they had ever found
contained within a massive cloud swirling around a black hole this massive cloud of water vapor
contains an estimated 140 trillion times the amount of water in all the earth's oceans
could water shortages on earth be solved by searching for sources of water off of our
planet number five a colossal bridge made of hydrogen a team of astronomers working from
puerto rico recently discovered a stream of atomic hydrogen stretching nearly 2.6 million light
years connecting two galaxies within the ngc 7448 galaxy group around 500 million light years away
while similar structures of atomic hydrogen like this one have been found inside of many galaxies
streams of gas like this have never been found outside the bounds of a galaxy this
discovery has made scientists question what they thought they understood about these structures
and has led to questions about the effects that they may have on their surroundings
number four an odd radio signal was received a new type of radio wave was detected
odd radio circles or orcs orcs are unexplained blobs of radio waves that astronomers have been
unable to connect to any object or phenomenon currently known these emissions do not contain
any other types of optical signal like infrared or x-rays like many others detected from the cosmos
while these radio bursts have never been detected before and seem to be a brand new phenomena
scientists still think that they could be coming from something that they already know about number
three asteroids can have rings just like planets planetary rings can be found around four planets
within our own solar system and many planets throughout the cosmos may have similar rings
these rings are usually formed from rocky and icy asteroids coming close enough to the planet to be
torn apart by gravity far enough away from the surface to remain in orbit instead of falling
recently astronomers discovered that rings are not unique to just planets they found a system of
rings surrounding the asteroid known as chariqlow which is in the largest class of asteroids known
as centaurs it's still unknown exactly how the ring system formed but astronomers theorized that
smaller objects could have impacted terryclo's surface which kicked up a large amount of debris
that eventually settled into the rings held by the asteroid's gravity number two a quartet of quasars
quasars are some of the most brilliant and brightest objects in the universe
powered by supermassive black holes quasars blast high energy particles far into the depths of space
astronomers have found quite a few quasar pairs over time but just a few years ago
astronomers discovered the very first quadruple quasar ever found according to current models
the chances of having four quasars this close together is around 1 in 10 million coincidence
either astronomers got extremely lucky with this find or current models of the evolution of quasars
may need to be revisited and revised number one earth has a companion asteroid shadowing
its orbit known as 2020 xl5 this asteroid is only 1.1 kilometers in diameter and is the second
asteroid ever found that has been brought into the same orbit that earth takes around the sun these
objects have been dubbed trojan asteroids and some planets within our solar system are known to have
many of them while earth was believed to lack them until the recently published study in 2010 proved
its existence the study of the second earth's trojan asteroid 2020 xl5 has led astronomers to
discover that this object didn't join earth's orbit until a few centuries ago and it will
not stay here forever scientists calculated that in approximately 4 000 years 2020 xl5 will slip
out of its current orbit and begin traveling into the wider solar system what else might be lurking
in our own solar system waiting for us to find do you think the universe will ever run out of
mysteries that push the boundaries of science thanks for watching see you next time on matter